Among typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, all non-con­trar­i­ans love Hel­veti­ca. Some, like film­mak­er Gary Hus­twit and New York sub­way map cre­ator Mas­si­mo Vignel­li, even made a doc­u­men­tary about it. Cre­at­ed by Swiss graph­ic design­er Max Miedinger with Haas Type Foundry pres­i­dent Eduard Hoff­mann and first intro­duced in 1957, Hel­veti­ca still stands as a visu­al def­i­n­i­tion of not just mod­ernism but moder­ni­ty itself. That owes in part to its clean, unam­bigu­ous lines, and also to its use of space: as all the afore­men­tioned typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts will have noticed, Hel­veti­ca leaves lit­tle room between its let­ters, which imbues text writ­ten in the font with a cer­tain solid­i­ty. No won­der it so often appears, more than half a cen­tu­ry after its debut, on the sig­nage of pub­lic insti­tu­tions as well as on the pro­mo­tion of prod­ucts that live or die by the osten­si­ble time­less­ness of their designs.

But as times change, so must even near-per­fect fonts: hence Hel­veti­ca Now. “Four years ago, our Ger­man office [was] kick­ing around the idea of cre­at­ing a new ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca,” Charles Nix, type direc­tor at Hel­veti­ca-rights-hold­er Mono­type tells The Verge. “They had iden­ti­fied a short laun­dry list of things that would be bet­ter.” What short­com­ings they found arose from the fact that the font had been designed for an ana­log age of opti­cal print­ing, and “when we went dig­i­tal, a lot of that nuance of opti­cal siz­ing sort of washed away.” Ulti­mate­ly, the project was less about updat­ing Hel­veti­ca than restor­ing char­ac­ters lost in its adap­ta­tion to dig­i­tal, includ­ing “the straight-legged cap­i­tal ‘R,’ sin­gle-sto­ry low­er­case ‘a,’ low­er­case ‘u’ with­out a trail­ing serif, a low­er­case ‘t’ with­out a tail­ing stroke on the bot­tom right, a beard­less ‘g,’ some round­ed punc­tu­a­tion.”

The devel­op­ment of Hel­veti­ca Now also neces­si­tat­ed a close look at all the ver­sions of Hel­veti­ca so far devel­oped (the most notable major revi­sion being Neue Hel­veti­ca, released in 1983) and adapt­ing their best char­ac­ter­is­tics for an age of screens. Few of those char­ac­ter­is­tics demand­ed more atten­tion than the spac­ing — or to use the typo­graph­i­cal term, the kern­ing. But how­ev­er aston­ish­ing a show­case it may be, Hel­veti­ca Now does­n’t dri­ve home the impor­tance of the art of kern­ing in as vis­cer­al a man­ner as anoth­er new type­face: Hel­l­veti­ca, designed by New York cre­ative direc­tors Zack Roif and Matthew Wood­ward. Much painstak­ing labor has also gone into Hel­l­veti­ca’s kern­ing, but not to make it as beau­ti­ful as pos­si­ble: on the con­trary, Roif and Woodard have tak­en Hel­veti­ca and kerned it for max­i­mum ugli­ness.

The Verge’s Jon Porter describes Hel­l­veti­ca as “a self-aware Com­ic Sans with kern­ing that’s some­how much much worse.” If that most hat­ed Win­dows font has­n’t been enough to inflict psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tur­bance on the design­ers in your life, you can head to Hel­l­veti­ca’s offi­cial site and “expe­ri­ence it in all its uneven, gap­py glo­ry.” Roif and Woodard have made Hel­l­veti­ca free to use, some­thing that cer­tain­ly can’t be said of any gen­uine ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca. In fact, the sheer cost of licens­ing that most mod­ern of all fonts has, in recent years, pushed even the for­mer­ly Hel­veti­ca-using likes of Apple, Google, and IBM to come up with their own type­faces instead — all of which, telling­ly, resem­ble Hel­veti­ca. We can con­sid­er them all weapons in the life of a design­er, which, as Vignel­li put it, “is a life of fight. Fight against the ugli­ness.” Hap­py down­load­ing…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­ic Sans Turns 25: Graph­ic Design­er Vin­cent Connare Explains Why He Cre­at­ed the Most Hat­ed Font in the World

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

Van Gogh’s Ugli­est Mas­ter­piece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Paint­ing, The Night Café (1888)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

What we write reveals who we are, but so, and often more clear­ly, does how we write. And in an age when hand­writ­ing has giv­en way to typ­ing, how we write has much to do with which font we use. Many of us play it safe, rarely stray­ing from the realm of twelve-point Times New Roman hyper­nor­mal­i­ty, but even there “type is a voice; its very qual­i­ties and char­ac­ter­is­tics com­mu­ni­cate to read­ers a mean­ing beyond mere syn­tax.” That obser­va­tion comes from the Ban Com­ic Sans Man­i­festo, drawn up two decades ago by graph­ic design­ers Hol­ly and David Combs as a strike against the font that, 25 years after its cre­ation, remains a hate object of choice for the visu­al­ly lit­er­ate every­where.

“You don’t like that your cowork­er used me on that note about steal­ing her yogurt from the break room fridge?” asks Com­ic Sans itself, ven­tril­o­quized in McSweeney’s by Mike Lach­er. “You don’t like that I’m all over your sister-in-law’s blog? You don’t like that I’m on the sign for that new Thai place? You think I’m pedes­tri­an and tacky?” Well, tough: “Peo­ple love me. Why? Because I’m fun. I’m the life of the par­ty. I bring lev­i­ty to any sit­u­a­tion. Need to soft­en the blow of a harsh mes­sage about restroom eti­quette? SLAM. There I am. Need to spice up the direc­tions to your grad­u­a­tion par­ty? WHAM. There again. Need to con­vey your fun-lov­ing, approach­able nature on your busi­ness’ web­site? SMACK.”

In the Great Big Sto­ry video above, Com­ic Sans cre­ator Vin­cent Connare tells his side of the sto­ry. While employed at Microsoft in the ear­ly 1990s, he saw a pro­to­type ver­sion of Microsoft Bob, a kind of add-on to the Win­dows inter­face designed for max­i­mum user friend­li­ness. It fea­tured onscreen ani­mal char­ac­ters that spoke in speech bub­bles, but the words in those speech bub­bles appeared in what was every­one’s default font. When it hit him that “dogs don’t talk in Times New Roman,” Connare, a graph­ic-nov­el fan, got to work on a type­face for the speech bub­bles mod­eled on the let­ter­ing by John Costan­za in The Dark Knight Returns and by Dave Gib­bons in Watch­men.

Com­ic Sans did­n’t make it into Microsoft Bob, it did make it into a some­what more suc­cess­ful Microsoft prod­uct: Win­dows 95, which David Kadavy at Design for Hack­ers calls “the first oper­at­ing sys­tem to real­ly hit it big. Just as com­put­ers were start­ing to pop up in near­ly every home in Amer­i­ca, Win­dows 95 was find­ing itself installed on all of those com­put­ers, and with it, the font Com­ic Sans. So now, near­ly every man, woman, child, and bake sale orga­niz­er find them­selves armed with pub­lish­ing pow­er unlike civ­i­liza­tion had ever seen; and few of them real­ly had any design sense.” Then came the inter­net boom, which meant that “instead of fly­ers post­ed in break rooms, Com­ic Sans was show­ing up on web­sites, and even as the default font for many people’s emails. Now, any one per­son could write a mes­sage that could poten­tial­ly be read by mil­lions, in Com­ic Sans.”

What makes Com­ic Sans so reviled? Kadavy points to sev­er­al rea­sons hav­ing to do with typo­graph­i­cal aes­thet­ics, includ­ing awk­ward weight dis­tri­b­u­tion (“weight” being the thick­ness of its lines) and poor let­ter­fit (mean­ing that its let­ters don’t, or can’t, sit well next to each oth­er). But the prob­lem most of us notice is that “Com­ic Sans isn’t used as intend­ed”: A type­face meant only for speech bub­bles in Microsoft Bob has some­how become one of the most pop­u­lar in the world, appear­ing unsuit­ably in every­thing from Cleve­land Cav­a­liers own­er Dan Gilbert’s open let­ter on the depar­ture of LeBron James to CERN’s announce­ment of evi­dence of the Hig­gs boson par­ti­cle to, just last month, a let­ter from Don­ald Trump’s lawyer’s to the House Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tee.

Through it all, Connare him­self — who has designed such rel­a­tive­ly respectable type­faces as Tre­buchet, and has famous­ly only used Com­ic Sans once, in a com­plaint let­ter to his cable com­pa­ny — has kept his sense of humor, as evi­denced by his talk enti­tled “Com­ic Sans Is the Best Font in the World.” Even the Combs’ move­ment has changed its name, if not with­out irony, into “Use Com­ic Sans.” Pieces mark­ing the font’s 25th anniver­sary include “Hat­ing Com­ic Sans Is Not a Per­son­al­i­ty” by The New York Times’ Emma Gold­berg and “In Bad Taste or Not, I’ll Keep My Com­ic Sans” by The Wash­ing­ton Post’s Joseph Epstein (pub­lished, entire­ly and coura­geous­ly, in Com­ic Sans). If you love the font, Connare often says, you don’t know much about typog­ra­phy, but if you hate it, “you should get anoth­er hob­by.” Besides, the sto­ry of Com­ic Sans also con­tains an impor­tant life les­son: “You have to do things that aren’t beau­ti­ful some­times.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Down­load Icon­ic Nation­al Park Fonts: They’re Now Dig­i­tized & Free to Use

Learn Cal­lig­ra­phy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famous­ly Inspir­ing Cal­lig­ra­phy Teacher

How to Write Like an Archi­tect: Short Primers on Writ­ing with the Neat, Clean Lines of a Design­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.